Programme

The extracurricular Change Leaders programme consists of three modules (15 EC in total, and is spread out over UT’s 3 quartiles): Contact time, in Q2 and Q3, tends to be on the Tuesday evenings, in Ravelijn. In Q4 you work on your projects while receiving customized coaching. Moreover, there will be one Friday afternoon, at the very end of the academic year, early July, in which everyone is presenting his or her results to each other.

Practical information

The programme requires three quartiles (of 5 EC each) to complete (November to July) and has both a cognitive and an experiential character:

1. The cognitive component starts in November and lasts until February. The meetings take place during the evenings: mostly one Tuesday evening per week (18.45 – 21.00 hour).

2. The experiential component starts in February and lasts until July. This part consists of evening training sessions (in Q3), plus individual coaching (in Q4).

All group sessions take place at the UT Campus. The entire programme will require you to invest half a day per week, on average. You will spend this time attending lectures or tutorials and working on your (pre-viewing and reviewing) assignments. The language of instruction will be English. The programme is free of charge for qualified UT students.

Structure of the programme

Towards the end of the first module, all the students in the programme get a psychometrically valid, customized personality assessment. The results of this assessment will be used as a guide to your further personal development, explicitly in the experiential part of the programme, and in the context of the coaching during your project in Q4.

You will start the programme with the cognitive part (Q2), which is devoted to various topics within the fields of ‘change and leadership’. The teaching in this component consists of lectures and preparations and discussions and written post-meeting reflections. You will then also choose an individual topic that you will examine by engaging in the writing of a literature review on the basis of desk research: either by yourself or in a group (it is encouraged to fulfil this obligation in a group, given that the rest of the program is already quite individual; solid networking with like-minded people is namely also a goal of this programme.).

Some possible topics for the literature review:

-

(virtual) leadership of effective (virtual) teams;

-

(collaborative) processes between external consultant and client;

-

biological roots of excellent leadership;

-

non-manipulative organizational processes to reach high efficiency:

-

gossip and emotional intelligence at work.

The aim of the experiential -or Q3- skills part is to develop leadership, consulting and change skills and insights: through training and reading about and reflecting on the various skills you will be trained in. In other words, in the second module (in quartile 3), you will sharpen up your own, personal change & leadership skills. At the end of quartile three, you will have a set of well-developed personal goals that you will work on, with a coach, during the project or Q4 part of this programme.

Completion

You will conclude the first part with a paper that will be critiqued. At the end of the second part, you will write a report of about five pages on the outcome of your project and your learning experiences. You will also be provided with individual feedback on this report.

Upon successful completion of the entire programme, you will receive a certificate and your Master’s degree will be designated ‘with honours’. Before this occurs, the group of Change Leaders must self-organize a final Friday afternoon (usually this is in early July) in which all students show to family, friends, coaches and other interested parties, what they have learned in this program. Typically, on that occasion, each cohort’s final booklet will then also be unveiled: this booklet is a tangible result of a cooperative process among the Change Leaders’ students themselves, that typically starts in the middle of Q4.